


His Last Smile

by nagi_schwarz



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-25
Updated: 2009-04-25
Packaged: 2018-05-26 06:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6228103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Originally written as a gift for cozzy_bob on the GW Dark Fic comm on LJ.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Last Smile

 

“How are you doing today, Duo?” Sally smiled and gestured for him to take the seat opposite her desk.

He plopped down in it with a grin. She noticed that he drew his hands into his lap to fidget with the hem of his shirt. It was, she realized, because he didn’t have his braid to fidget with anymore. His hair had been the first thing to go in the year his captors held him on that resource satellite. His t-shirt was too big on him - it fit across his shoulders, but it gaped all down his torso.

Sally made a note on her chart; he still hadn’t regained the weight he’d lost.

“I’m doing pretty good, actually,” Duo said. His gaze darted nervously around her office - at the books, the pictures on the walls, her certifications. He lingered on a photograph of himself, Sally, and Heero standing outside of Preventer Headquarters. It was taken before That Year - the year Duo had been gone.

That’s what everyone in the office called it.

_Gone_.

“You eating all right? Sleeping all right?”

Duo nodded, and his eyes were bright, almost feverish. She wondered if he’d stopped insisting someone else test his food before he ate it; his first three days in the Preventer’s Hospital he’d been wild, delirious, insisting the staff was trying to slip drugs in his food.

“Yeah. Heero’s a pretty good cook, you know? And he’s good about waking me up when I – dream.”

Sally arched an eyebrow. “Heero? Really? I didn’t realize he was so...domestic.” She made another note on her chart. Did Une know about this?

Duo nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah, he’s practically a chef. I’m thinking it’s something Dr. J made him learn, you know? So he could - I dunno, sneak into Relena’s palace as one of the kitchen staff and assassinate her or something. Heero’s got a ton of random cool skills. Sorta makes me think he let Trowa suffer Catherine’s murder soup out of some misplaced sense of schadenfreude, you know? He doesn’t smile a lot. Definitely some schadenfreude going on there.”

_Schadenfreude_. A German term. The terrorists who’d held him had hailed largely from the former Prussian states. They’d had more of an effect on him than the doctors realized at first; it was Sally’s job to discover the extent of the damage to his mind.

The damage to his body was unforgettable. Sally swallowed hard whenever she opened the file and saw the photographs. Duo’s body was a map of sadism, of scars from cuts, burns, brands, and other tortures inflicted. The sheer number of broken bones he’d suffered, the damage to his fingernail beds – was there anything his captors hadn’t done to him? But now wasn’t the time to get distracted. Sally was in charge; she was the doctor, and she had to keep them on task.

“Why doesn’t Heero smile?” Sally asked.

Duo shrugged. “Dunno.”

“Do you want to talk about your dreams?”

Duo just looked at her.

The rest of the fifty-five minutes were spent in unnerving silence. Sally had had patients like this before, so she could keep her composure, but she was startled at how still Duo was. He was almost unnaturally still compared to his previous habit of energetic fidgeting from before he’d been _gone_. His stillness now was breathless, as if he were a gazelle gone motionless in hopes the lioness hadn’t spotted him. Another note on the chart.

When the clock reached the fifty-five minute mark, Duo rose from his chair, grin back in place. “Thanks, Dr. Po. Same time next week?”

Sally nodded. “Of course. It was good talking to you.” So he was still paranoid, possibly suffering from PTSD and perhaps the symptoms of a disorder akin to Stockholm Syndrome, if he had affected some of his captors’ habits as a show of loyalty, an outgrowth of his survival-necessary affection for them. Sally would have to do a more thorough evaluation to see if they’d tried to brainwash him and what, if anything, had taken hold.

Then there was the problem of Heero. She needed to talk to Une about it.

* * *

The doctors’ notes were clinical, cold, and unfeeling. Sally could only imagine what Duo had been feeling when each wound was inflicted. _At least a dozen times in the past year, patient’s fingernails were forcefully removed. Scars at nail beds and on cuticles suggest pliers of some blunt form_.

Sally closed her eyes to calm herself, and then the door opened. Duo flung himself down in the seat opposite her. His eyes were ringed with shadows.

“You look like you haven’t been sleeping well,” Sally said.

Duo glared at her. “Heero’s been harping on me about it too. It’s not like he never screams in his sleep. We were both soldiers. We saw – things. Things no child should, you know?” He ran a hand through his short hair, and it was heartbreaking to see how sharp his face looked without his long red-brown hair softening the arch of his cheekbone, the line of his jaw.

“Are you eating well?”

“Well enough,” Duo said, but his cheeks looked hollow, shrunken. Had he been losing weight?

“I thought you said Heero was a good cook.”

“He is - don’t get me wrong. But he’s Japanese, and man cannot live on rice and raw fish alone. And he won’t make me mochi.” Duo’s glare softened, and he sighed. “I shouldn’t be so hard on him. It’s not like he has to take care of me - he’s just being a good friend.”

“Do you get any input on the grocery shopping?”

“Well, I -” Duo made a twisting motion with his fingers, as if he were twisting a length of yarn. Or the end of his braid. “I don’t like going to the supermarket.”

“Why?”

“Look, Doc, we have confidentiality and all, right? I mean, Quatre keeps telling me the same thing goes with his lawyers, but they’re smarmy bastards.” Duo leaned in. “You promise not to tell?”

Sally nodded.

“It’s not a promise unless you say it aloud. That’s what Sister Helen told me.”

Who was Sister Helen? Another note for the file, and Sally said, “I promise.”

“The people at the supermarket - they know who I am.”

“Well, don’t they know you’re Heero’s friend? He takes you to the neighborhood place, right? The Safeway?” Sally studied his expression, waiting for the change in inflection that meant he’d withdrawn from lucidity.

“They know I’m a Gundam Pilot,” Duo said. “I mean, I’m not one anymore, but that’s all people remember from the War. Gundam Pilots, Zechs Merquise and his nutjob attempt on offing Earth, and Treize Khushrenada and his holier-than-thou bent on teaching humanity what it’ll never learn.”

“How do they know you were a pilot?”

Duo’s jaw twitched. Anger? Annoyance? “I can tell. By the way they look at me. I didn’t survive to be this age without being able to tell when someone’s looking at me like they want to plant a knife between my ribs.”

Someone had planted a knife between his ribs more than once. Even his lungs were scarred from the damage. They’d left him for hours to lie, slowly suffocating in his own blood before sending in a medic to treat him. They’d even let the wounds become infected multiple times before administering antibiotics, and – Sally jerked herself back to the present.

“Won’t Heero protect you?”

“He shouldn’t have to. The war is over. He never has to kill again.” Duo’s eyes flashed.

“No, no he doesn’t,” Sally said.

“You’d think, now that the war’s over, he’d smile more,” Duo said.

That was a non-sequitur, but Sally made a note of it anyway. Duo hardly smiled these days either. “Do you like it when he smiles?”

“I – don’t know.”

Sally penned another note. The clock reached fifty-five minutes. “It was good talking to you, Duo. Same time next week.”

* * *

Sally looked up and smiled. “Hey, you, you’re looking pretty good! Tell me all about your week.”

Duo’s eyes were bright with genuine happiness this time, and he was holding a brown stuffed teddy bear that he walked back and forth across his lap while he spoke.

“It was great! When Heero got back from the office last night, he took me out to the carnival that came into town. We got to see Trowa and Catherine doing their trapeze act and their knife act, and even Quatre was there.” Duo held up the bear. “Heero won this for me. I mean, I could have won it myself; I have perfectly good aim, but it was the principle of the thing, you know? He gets a little sad about teddy bears. I don’t think he had one when he was a kid. I had one while I was at the orphanage. It was secondhand and falling apart and eventually I gave it to one of the younger kids, but Sister Helen gave it to me.”

Again with the Sister Helen. It was sweet and almost heartbreaking to see Duo so happy about something as simple as a carnival, but then he’d never had the same childhood opportunities as Quatre and Wufei.

“I’m glad you had fun,” Sally said. “You look like you’ve been eating better.”

“I conned Heero into buying a whole lot of overpriced carnival junk food,” Duo said. “Cotton candy, pretzels, hot dogs, churros, popcorn, the works. He grumbled about the price, but I pointed out that, creds per ounce, we were getting good sentimental value.” His smile was infectious.

“Credits per ounce?” Sally asked.

Duo shrugged. “It’s a game Heero and I liked to play before.” _Before_. Even if he never spoke of what had happened to him, he realized there’d been a shift in his life, that something had happened, something for which there was a _before_ and a drastically different _after_.

“We’d wander up and down the aisles of the supermarket and grab random cans off the shelf based on the price of the item, creds per ounce. We’d set a certain unit price each week and that’s what we’d buy. Of course, Heero’s a much more responsible homemaker now, but still. Creds per ounce.”

Sally arched one eyebrow. “That’s some pretty quick math.”

Duo blinked at her, surprised. “You think so?”

“I’m a doctor and I can’t do math that fast.”

Duo sat back in his chair, still toying with the teddy bear. “Really? I learned how to do it so I could pilot Deathscythe. Gotta be able to run numbers for battle statistics, for ammo, for trajectory to launch into space - that sort of thing. I’m sure any pilot could do it.”

Sally could pilot a mobile suit, and she couldn’t do math like that. She doubted Noin could either. Maybe Zechs, but not most pilots. “I don’t know that _any_ pilot could. Duo, have you ever taken an IQ test?”

He snorted derisively. “You think they give those things out on L2?”

“Right. Well, maybe we’ll see about having you take one. Just to see at what level your mind operates.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” Sally smiled and hoped it wasn’t too tired. “So, you had a good time at the carnival?”

Duo’s eyes lit up again. “Yeah, it was awesome. Heero actually smiled! He has a nice smile. He should smile more often. I can’t remember the last time he smiled.”

Sally swallowed. “Heero smiled? Glad to hear it.”

Duo was out of his chair as soon as the clock reached fifty-five minutes. “Same time next week!” He waved and headed for the door. He barely noticed the hospital nurse who opened the door for him, who shepherded him back down the hall to his room.

Sally stared down at her charts and notes and sighed. He wasn’t getting any better. In fact, he was getting much, much worse. She didn’t know how long the Preventers would keep him before sending him to a government facility. Quatre would probably donate to the cause, make sure Duo was sent somewhere comfortable where the staff would be sensitive to his condition and who he was, what he was capable of, but it would still be a government facility, and his field noncompliance would never be lifted short of a miracle.

She wondered who had sent the teddy bear.

Then her intercom clicked on.

“Well?” It was Lady Une.

“He’s still suffering from severe delusions.”

“How severe?”

“Not only does he believe that he’s living with Heero Yuy, he now believes that Heero is taking him out around town, that they do fun things like go to the carnival and spend time with Trowa and Quatre.”

The silence on the other end of the line was ominous. Then Lady Une said, “Sign the transfer order.”

“Yes, Lady.” Sally punched a button on her phone and disconnected. Then, with shaking hands, she pulled a transfer order out of her top drawer. It was quick work, filling it out. She’d stared at Duo’s file so many times for so long that she had all his vital statistics memorized.

She’d never hated her own name more than when she signed it on the bottom of the transfer order.

* * *

The nurses stood on either side of Duo, watching anxiously to make sure he didn’t drop the blanket they’d wrapped him in. He’d lost even more weight, and he shivered all the time. In order to keep him obedient, they’d injected him with a sedative before loading him into the transport carrier. It was Lady Une’s order to bring him to this place, but neither nurse thought it was doing any good. At least it wasn’t doing any harm. Duo stood on the grassy knoll, eyes blank.

He probably didn’t even see the name on the plain granite headstone wreathed with long-dead flowers.

_Heero Yuy_

_AC 180 - AC 205_

_Friend, Brother, Honorable Warrior_

At the L1-X118701 Government Hospital, a new patient slept in the Permanent Mental Malady ward. He clutched a teddy bear close and dreamed of a crowd of terrorists screeching at him in the rough Prussian dialect of former OZ-Romefeller leaders, dreamed of a knife slicing off the length of his hair, a knife carving a last smile on Heero Yuy.


End file.
